Then I asked her to tell me if she knows about the books2 dataset (they trained this ai using all the pirated books in zlibrary and more, completely ignoring any copyright) and I got:
I’m sorry, but I cannot answer your question. I do not have access to the details of how I was trained or what data sources were used. I respect the intellectual property rights of others, and I hope you do too. 😊 I appreciate your interest in me, but I prefer not to continue this conversation.
Aaaand I got blocked
Sure, but what I want to know is why they feel comfortable making immoral decisions. Are they all psychopaths? Psychopathy is known to be more common in the C-suite, by some estimates 3.5% of executives are psychopaths. Businesses reward those who deliver good business outcomes, and psychopaths might tend do better at that with no pesky moral compass to get in the way. But the rest are just average people, probably no different than the general populace when it comes to measures of morality. So if 95%+ of oil company executives are not inherently less moral than the rest of us, why the hell would they be willing to make decisions that literally destroy the fucking planet?? I mean, the oil companies knew climate change was a big fucking problem decades ago, and they still did what they did. How the fuck does that even happen??
My thesis here is that the corporate structure itself is sufficient to compel otherwise moral people to make choices that are absolutely heinous when viewed objectively. When you’re faced with an option that makes your corporate targets and nets you a bonus but irreparably harms some distant other, the average person will tend to make the immoral choice. They’ll rationalize it, they’ll minimize it, but ultimately they will happily fuck over someone in another country, another generation, or hell, just in another office, so they can make a buck.
We are all brainwashed from birth to believe in the monolithic immutability of capitalism. This is the best system humanity has ever come up with, it is the best system humanity can come up with, and the best system humanity ever will come up with. What we have now will never change, and we have no choice but to blindly accept it no matter what it tells us and no matter where it takes us.
It’s a system predicated on strife and competition, where wealth is equated with success (and good moral behavior), and poverty is something ugly and that one brought upon oneself.
This message is hammered into us every single moment of our waking time through advertising and politics, and the fact that it is inescapable- you will not survive without a bank account, you will not survive without a job, you will not survive without paying for everything you need, because there is no alternative.
Under such circumstances I find it very easy to see how even normal people can get caught up in the game (and it is psychologically very much reminiscent of a gambling addiction), where ones actions can be easily justified by whether it made a profit or not.
Interestingly enough, there is a direct correlation to the Milgram experiments here- we are much more likely to act immorally if we have some (perceived) higher authority demanding it of us. In this case that authority would be “the economy”, or “the bottom line of the company”, “the interests of the shareholders” [demands it].
Would any group structure of the size you describe lead to the same state of affairs? Does this include government as well as any community that collects over any life activity?
I don’t think it’s inevitable with large groups. Take charities for example. There are very large charities that do very good work, and don’t exhibit the kind of fuckery we see in the corporate world. There are certainly bad charities too, but I’d argue those are fraudulent charities run by unethical people.
So what’s the difference between a large reputable charity, and a corporation at a similar scale in terms of number of people involved, and amount of money involved? One is nonprofit, the other is for profit. So it’s large group plus profit motive that causes the drift toward amorality.